Fiona Hill is back with more scathing stories of her time in the Trump White House.
Hill, who served as the National Security Council's top Russia adviser from 2017 to 2019, notably held nothing back as she testified in President Trump's impeachment hearings last fall. She had a tense relationship with Trump from early in her tenure after he mistook her for a secretary, and, as she describes to The New Yorker in a profile published Monday, only experienced more misogynistic treatment from that point on.
Hill was introduced to Trump "by title but not by name" on her first day in the White House, but he didn't seem to remember her a month later, The New Yorker writes. During that subsequent encounter, Hill was in the Oval Office for a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and spent the conversation taking notes. But instead of having a "substantive discussion" after the call like Hill said she expected, Trump simply began dictating revisions to a press statement about it and then, after realizing Hill wasn't writing them down, asked "Hey, darling, are you listening?"
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Hill's boss, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, insisted she shouldn't apologize to Trump because "he'll think it's weakness," she recalled. Still, it was clear Trump considered Hill "suspect" from that point on, one former official told The New Yorker, saying "Forgive me, Fiona's attractive, but he doesn't trust women that are kind of non-players in his world." And from then on, former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and other top officials started calling Hill "that Russia b----," a former national security adviser said.
Read more about Hill's time in the White House at The New Yorker.
